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In 2015, the fourth IABA Europe conference took place in Funchal, Madeira, [being] hosted by the Centre for Atlantic Studies (CEHA) and co-hosted by the European Journal of Life Writing. This conference aimed to advance contemporary discussion on narrating lives (telling life stories) by and interpretation of life narrative and life writing, and the tensions to which these may give rise.

Jefferson Hunter introduced the term phototext in 1987 to describe a combination of words and photographic images, in which both parts ‘contribute equally to their meaning’. This paper argues that photographs in biographies, although commonly considered to illustrate or support the biographical text, form an inseparable union with the words that accompany them – a phototext. I therefore develop Hunter’s concept by using the term phototext to denote not only ‘composite publications’ but also other forms of combinations between photographs and words, namely ekphrasis and delayed connections, where image and text are separated. By looking at two frequently portrayed women writers – Sylvia Plath and Ingeborg Bachmann – this paper analyses common patterns of biographical phototexts. I have chosen one photograph of each writer, which is imprinted or referred to in at least two books, to explain the workings of such hybrid narratives. Together, these phototexts form an interacting net of correspondences across the biographies. Phototextual patterns focus on topics that cannot easily be represented by words only, for example the condition of the author’s body or spatial settings, and therefore cause a shift in the bimedia (im)balance. By applying the concept of phototext on literary biographies, the article shows how they stage not only images of Bachmann and Plath – both literal and metaphorical – but also images of women writers in general. The intermedial approach can disclose the biographer’s strategy of representing the writer.

This paper argues that by structuring potentially traumatising memories through narration, autobiographical storytelling reduces the experience of contingency, supports narrators in regaining feelings of autonomy and thus enables traumatised individuals to complete their otherwise potentially incomplete autobiography. Post-trauma writing carries the chance to re-articulate highly emotional experiences with formerly 'random or isolated events' into a meaningful storyline. The effects of highly emotionally experienced trauma decrease and enable the individual to continue narration about their present and potential future. A case study of a veteran autobiography is used to emphasise the meaning of autobiographical writing when individuals suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This paper is particularly relevant in times where war and terror are frequently not just communicated through the media but are experienced by millions of people worldwide. At the same time, it is a contribution to the rapidly developing field of Cognitive Narratology and Restorative Narratives.

This paper critically examines the representation of gender and race in the biographical drama film Hidden Figures (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi. The film is based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, which spotlights previously hidden figures in US history: the black female mathematicians who worked in the early US space program. The movie was released to critical acclaim and embraced by audiences as empowering African American girls. At the same time, the film was criticized for including a ‘white savior’ scene in which the black female protagonists are marginalized. After providing background information on Shetterly’s book and the film’s critical reception, this paper conducts a close formal analysis of a pivotal sequence in the film, which is compared to the events told in the nonfiction book. To shed light on the power structures that the film sequence projects, the results of this analysis are, subsequently, related to critical theoretical approaches to Hollywood cinema, as well as to Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies.’ In conclusion, we argue that Hollywood filmmakers’ expectations about the desires of ‘mainstream’ audiences work to perpetuate the repression of previously repressed herstory on the ‘silver screen.’

When the British painter Keith Vaughan (1912–77) ingested a lethal cocktail of barbiturates, having made the decision to end his life after a long struggle with cancer, there was only one thing left to do: write one final entry in his journal, the lifelong literary account he had commenced in 1939 and maintained ever since. Vaughan’s journal is an extraordinary document, its 61 volumes spanning 38 years of impassioned ideas and personal development from his difficult wartime years as a conscientious objector through his post-war life as a successful but troubled artist. This paper focuses on the final volume of Vaughan’s journal, commenced in August 1975 and ending on the morning of 4 November 1977. It considers how Vaughan used journal-writing at a time of great suffering to reflect upon his life and his reasons for leaving it. By revealing the crucial role that Vaughan’s final volume played in justifying that his life had ceased to have forward momentum or meaning, this paper argues for the close relationship between the practice of journal-writing and questions of futurity, positing Vaughan as an exemplary author-subject who uses diary or journal forms to postulate a potential future and their relationship to it.

The postmodern features of English fiction like fragmentation and metafictionality seem to find an equivalent in life writing and metabiography. Such instances of metabiography either expose the protagonist in the process of writing a biography or memoir, and/or include extracts of life writings which are textually incorporated in their original format. The aim of this paper is first to explore the structural characteristics of metabiography and its evolution from a theme to a structure/form, through Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888), A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and Marina Warner’s fiction. As Richard Holmes explains, “the boundaries between fact and fiction have become controversial and perilous” (16), boundaries which are crossed by Warner and Byatt, both postmodern female novelists who rely on the plurality of voices and textual collage instead of the conventional omniscient narrator and the linear narrative represented by James. Second, the focus will be on the strategies combining the aesthetic with the ethical, or “the political desire to write the histories of the marginalised, the forgotten, the unrecorded” (Byatt On Histories 10-11) through metabiographical autobiographies and diaries in Warner’s Indigo and The Lost Father. The life writing themes treated in these novels are also studied in relation to the modernist and postmodernist views of reality, history and representation which they reflect.

This paper examines the narrative tropes of Hungarian adolescent diaries written during and after World War II, primarily focusing on the rhetorical forms of beginning a diary that fall into two categories characteristic of adolescent diary-writing – beginning with an introduction describing the author and their environment, or beginning with a memoir in which the author summarizes the most important events of the period between their birth and the start of the diary. The paper also discusses how adolescents personified their diary books and intended those for their adult selves in the course of diary-writing as dialogue.

Following two successful conferences in Amsterdam in 2009 and in Tallinn in 2011, the third IABA Europe biennial conference, held from 31 October to 3 November 2013 in Vienna and hosted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, was entitled “Beyond the Subject. New Developments in Life Writing” and aimed at bridging the gap between historical forms of life writing and the most recent medial transformations in the genre of life writing, like personal websites, blogs and social networks as new spaces in the autobiographical public sphere. At the same time, the conference focused on auto/biographical practices that consciously undermine the traditional Western concept of the subject and develop alternative models of life writing. After the conference, participants were invited to submit articles based on their papers presented at the 2013 IABA Europe conference, to be published in the European Journal of Life Writing. In this section of the journal you will find more samples of the different topics that were addressed during the conference; the first six articles based on papers presented at the conference can be found in Volume III of the Journal.

Both self-help books and illness narratives are motivated by an impulse to overcome a crisis and, simultaneously, to help others who suffer from similar conditions. In doing so, authors of self-help and illness narratives move in between polar opposites: they have both individual and collective motives, they have a desire to overcome uncertainty and achieve control and they negotiate the authority of experience versus the authority of expertise. This paper has two objectives: (1) It describes the intersections of illness life writing and self-help culture and traces the thematic, cultural and historical similarities. (2) It analyzes a selection of four autobiographical, U.S.-American self-help books on age-related infertility published between 1987 and 2009. In juxtaposing these books with research perspectives from self-help criticism and medical humanities, the paper suggests that the authors blur the boundaries between patient and expert in their attempts to achieve control over what is ultimately uncontrollable – the body. The paper closes with a reflection on how scientific discourses and the Quantified Self-movement influence self-help narratives on illness.

In German-speaking countries as elsewhere, women, especially from the middle classes, demanded entry into the male-dominated academic world with growing vehemence around 1900. This essay focuses on the constellations and dynamics that prompted the reframing of the social field of knowledge production. Taking the case of the women’s rights activist and writer Käthe Schirmacher, who publicly campaigned for women’s access to higher education, I explore the motivations, social transformations and socially available life plans behind her path. To this end, I draw on the concept of the scholarly persona as a mediating instance between individual aspirations and social relations and examine its potential for a gender-sensitive intellectual history. Here I argue that a differentiated analysis of knowledge production in the sciences and the humanities is only possible if non-institutional and, therefore, less obvious gender regimes are also addressed. The institutional and private arrangements that enable academics, intellectuals, and also artists to concentrate on their work play an essential part in their production of knowledge and artistic work. Therefore, the key argument of this paper is that questions about gender-specific (as well as class-specific) life plans in various creative social fields can only be examined in a differentiated way if this support is systematically included in research on the scholarly, intellectual, or artistic persona.

Otto Neurath and Marie Reidemeister were both part of an interdisciplinary team which developed the ‘Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics’ (later known as Isotype). Neurath is usually credited as the ‘inventor’ of Isotype, yet Reidemeister was a key figure in this work of visual education from the beginning. After Neurath’s death in 1945, she continued the Isotype work for two and a half decades. Marie Reidemeister also became a historian of Isotype and, in the 1970s and 1980s, she was involved in editing publications about Otto Neurath, helping to shape and correct the record of his life and work. This paper explores the challenges faced by female surviving partners who have worked intensively with their spouses for a long time and later work on their legacy. What problems arise from the effort to honour the deceased partner for one’s own visibility as a researcher? Marie Reidemeister’s role and attitude deserve examination for not fully conforming to the stereotype of a widow anxious to control the reputation of a deceased partner; neither did she attempt to present herself as the ‘great woman behind a great man’, instead calmly recording facts that establish her as a pioneer of information design.

Gerda Lerner (1920–2013) was one of the most influential figures in the development of women’s and gender history. She knew the power of auto/biography and very consciously controlled her image through autobiographical writing. In this paper I want to analyze how Lerner built her scholarly persona to a large part on her autobiographical practices and how she kept on ‘editing’ this persona during her career and after it ended, aiming to integrate her various positions of exclusion and taboos as well as her diverse pioneering achievements. Looking more closely at three of Lerner’s autobiographical representations and inquiring into the gendered nature of the scholarly persona (with special regard to domestic arrangements), I want to illustrate how she was grappling with the integration of feminist consciousness into her scholarly selfhood in the late 1970s. At the same time, she made sure that her care work for her dying husband would not be visible to the scientific community. Other identities also remained taboo and could only be revealed after her career had ended – these include not only her well-known autobiographical outing as a Communist, but also her twenty-year identification as a housewife, which could only be related after leaving academia.

Associated with such life writing genres as (auto)biographies and memoirs, anecdotes are described as stories which “illustrate particular ideas, concepts, and views of the way a life is lived, making considerable editorial commentary on the nature of a particular ideological moment and the effect of that moment on individual lives.”(Encyclopedia of Life Writing) Anecdotes thus focus on, and highlight, episodes of a person’s life by transforming them into tales and stories using fictional narrative techniques and suspenseful plot twists. Having emigrated from Italy to Scotland at the beginning of the twentieth century and established his fish and chip shop in Glasgow, Joe Pieri was then interned and turned into an “enemy alien” on the day Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. In Isle of the Displaced, his book about this traumatic event, Pieri turns the most marking aspects of his journey to, and life in “Camp S” in Canada into a series of witty and comic anecdotes. This paper focuses on the definitions and history of anecdotal theory in order to analyse Pieri’s fictionalisation strategies and the way these stories function as a psychological dam in times of crisis, in addition to re-inscribing these important events in British and Italian histories. The main contention of this article is that the appeal of fiction increases during life’s most difficult times mainly thanks to the imaginative and tragic-comic powers of literariness.

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg’s life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of ‘youth’ in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg’s activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg’s life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun’s argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg’s argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

By drawing on postcolonial feminist discourse and Hamid Naficy’s (2001) notion of ‘accented’ cinema, in particular his approach of combining the interstitial position of exilic and diasporic filmmakers with concepts of authorship and genre, this paper explores the intersection between biographical film, gendered rewriting of history, and self-narrative as a site of resistance to nationalist and patriarchal ideologies in Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017). I argue that Neshat’s authorial style and her position as an exilic artist inflect the biographical film in its traditional form, showcasing an innovative perspective on the genre, restructuring it to reveal the constructedness of not only a cinematic process, but also of history and historical figures. Blending the stories of a present-day Iranian woman filmmaker and the professional life of the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum, Neshat displaces the biopic from its Western-centric roots by explicitly opening it up to a discourse of contemporary gender politics in the Middle East. In doing so, she exposes the social forces that shape the production of the biopic in relation to the notion of female authorship in the context of the transcultural circuits and feminist reclaiming of Oum Kulthum’s international stardom.

The 2013 feature film Belle presents an account of the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804). Belle was the daughter of Sir John Lindsay, a British naval officer, and Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman, and she was raised in the home of her great uncle Lord Mansfield during his tenure as Chief Justice of England. The record of Belle’s life is thin, and her story might have been altogether forgotten had it not been for a 1779 portrait of her in which she was painted alongside her white cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. The film was inspired by the portrait. The paucity of available facts left the filmmakers much latitude for fictionalizing, but even so the film makes significant departures from the historical record, for example, in its representations of Belle’s eventual husband, and in its insertion of Belle into the unfolding of the Zong case, a case involving slavery that was decided by Lord Mansfield in 1783. In this paper, I consider the effectiveness and the ethical implications of the filmmakers’ use of law to give voice to this historical figure.

This paper examines the image of American poverty, rejection and social engagement in a recent sports biopic inspired by the story of American skater Tonya Harding, Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya (2017). It draws on data presented in recent poverty studies to determine the extent of deprivation and attend to its representation in American cinema. In the light of the above, I closely analyze the biopic, focusing on its depiction of professional figure skating, expectations of female athletes, and most importantly, the figure of Tonya Harding. I argue that the protagonist’s social background dominates her portrayal, which also challenges the common conception of a sports biopic; Harding’s narrative is defined by her mismatch with ice skating’s normative expectations and, most importantly, by her social standing.

This paper sets out to examine the politics of representation of the biographical film, Ginnen Upan Seethala (2018), which focuses on the life and times of Rohana Wijeweera, a rebel leader who led two failed insurrections in post-independence Sri Lanka. It argues that while the film seemingly exonerates the leader and the movement, through a discourse of domesticity, it simultaneously engages in a nuanced representation of Chithrangani Wijeweera, the wife of Rohana Wijeweera, a woman who has been positioned at the margins of the masculinized historical record of the JVP party. While such records have largely ignored testimony in which Chithrangani constructs herself as a reluctant wife who is subordinated to the dominant ideology of the party and its leader, the film provides her a more expansive and empathetic role and thereby bears witness to her tale of victimhood and survival, unraveling how patriarchal political conquest coopts women as strategic sites of political domination.

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

At the end of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth century, encouraging violent criminals to write their life stories became an accepted tool of forensic medicine. The autobiographical texts which emerged became vital building blocks in the psychological diagnosis of the subject. One of the leading international exponents of this method was the Lyon-based professor Alexandre Lacassagne, who developed a science of criminal anthropology guided by the principles of heredity and phrenology (the idea that mental functions could be precisely located in specific parts of the brain). Lacassagne was fascinated by abnormal behaviour and urged the inmates of Lyon prisons to write their autobiographies. He took a paternal interest in them, studied their tattoos, and used their life writing as a key to understanding the criminal personality. Philippe Artières has been working on Lacassagne’s papers for over 25 years, and they formed the basis of his previous work Le livre des vies coupables: autobiographies de criminels, 1896-1909 (The book of guilty lives) (Paris, 2000 and 2014). In this new book, he revisits one particularly disturbing case – the Bladier affair of 1905.

The intertwinement of poetic life writing and theological reflections has a long-standing history in British literature. This paper shows how two Victorian poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. Abdullah Quilliam – use dialogic strategies to establish an autobiographic voice, which becomes an essential poetic means of the text. Through the representation of dialogic encounters, the poems establish an autobiographic mode of speaking, which is used to articulate individual conversion experiences and to negotiate conversion as an encounter with God. Based on the works of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I will show how a dynamic understanding of text and conversion experience is essential to a reading that seeks to explore the poetic construction of Hopkins’s as well as Quilliam’s works. The representation of the dynamic encounter of the self and the Divine in the contact zone of the text provides a frame in which the authors locate themselves with regard to the religious majority of Victorian Britain. The texts link the spiritual journey of conversion to the self as being caught in the world, responding to God’s call as an answer to the world’s condition.

The liminal space occupied by partially sighted people is little understood and much misrepresented in South African societies. Inter-personally and more broadly, visually impaired South Africans face stigma, discrimination and numerous structural barriers to educational, social and economic opportunities. These challenges remain largely invisible to those who never experience them. In this paper, I discuss my conversations with four South Africans who, like me, are visually impaired. These conversations form part of my research for Unseen, a project that brings together my interests in life writing and in exploring different aspects of the experience of visual impairment. I weave substantial extracts from our dialogues together with my own insights so as to give a sense of the texture of participants’ reported understanding, ideas, feelings, and sensorial adaptations, and also to investigate the multiple and overlapping influences of class, race, gender, age, community, sexual orientation and family on each individual’s subjective experience.

In the autobiographical stories of Nobel Prize award-winning author Alice Munro, questions of ontology and mortality are inextricably connected to matters of space and place. Fundamental existential dilemmas expressed in Munro’s corpus – signaled by the title of her second short story collection Who Do You Think You Are? – are linked to basic questions concerning orientation. Although autobiographical fiction frequently interweaves concerns about identity and deceased parents with recollections of ancestral spaces, as the literary critic Northrop Frye famously stated, the question ‘Where is here?’ is characteristic of the Canadian imagination. It is now also fundamental to the epoch of the Anthropocene. Although critics frequently praise Munro for her skill in presenting haunting, epiphanic moments, she is less often credited for her far less conventional tendency to tell stories covering years, even decades. My paper explores Munro’s preoccupation with these vast temporal arcs and their impact on her recursive autobiographical fiction. I argue that Munro’s penchant for ‘return and revision’ in her non-fictional works affords an opportunity for her protagonists and, by extension, her readers to revisit and ponder ancestral connections and the non-human dimensions of existence, which include sublime geological features and deep time.

Ippolito Nievo’s long autobiographical novel, Confessions of an Italian (Confessioni di un italiano), also known as ‘Confessions of an Octogenarian’ (Confessioni di un ottuagenario), in reference to its 80-year-old narrator, was actually written when the writer was…twenty-nine. The narrator takes on the role of an old man reflecting on his own life – from childhood, through youth until middle and old age – making the reader believe that he is dealing with the memories of a life already lived. Indeed, Nievo must have taken inspiration from his grandfather’s life at the turn of the nineteenth century to which he added his own experience. The irony of fate is well-known: The author died at the age of 29 and the unfinished novel was published in 1867, six years after his death. Since then, it has remained an outstanding literary specimen in both Italian and European literature. In this paper, we will dwell in particular on the clever outline of the narrator. The distance between the real and the fake narrator certainly belongs to the purest autobiographical tradition, and yet it offers here a further challenge to the writer, constantly trying to share his lifelong experience with the reader and the character himself. All things considered, Nievo foresaw both his own life and how he would have written it, as if he had already lived it and was about to die.

This paper explores Hayley’s approach to, and writing about, memorialising, focusing on his manuscript collection of epitaphs, his letters to Anna Seward about her epitaph on Lady Miller, and his memoirs and biographies. How typical was he of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century memorialists? What does his writing about death—and his writing about writing about death—tell us about how his contemporaries were supposed to feel and express their feelings about the dead? How do his works illustrate what he and his contemporaries were expected to reveal or conceal about the dead, and about the living? How different, in that respect, were the works designed to be read by the public from those intended only for the deceased’s nearest and dearest? How did the author’s death change the expected readership?

Food stories play an integral role in the ways that we imagine ourselves, both intimately in the context of home and family, and politically, in the context of the nation-state. But while food is intricately woven into the politics of place, it also crosses boundaries, gaining new meanings in the process. In this paper, we consider the transnational food histories that link the geographically distant but colonially-linked regions of Newfoundland and Suriname. Our collaborative autoethnographic inquiry examines the role that salt fish and molasses have played in our respective bodily memories and experiences. Central to our inquiry is a single question: What happens when salt fish – Newfoundland’s greatest export product – meets molasses, the sticky treacly by-product of the colonial Caribbean’s sugar cane refining process; that is, what happens when our palates meet? Engaging a decolonial lens, our collaborative work suggests the necessity of moving beyond culinary nostalgia towards the complexity of an “unsettled palate” that acknowledges the legacies of our shared transnational histories and the ongoing effects of colonialism and slavery. In the process, we critically reflect upon the ways in which we are each implicated in these histories, albeit in different ways.

In the “age of the selfie” (Jerry Saltz), we gauge the self as active. This paper proposes to engage the selfie as a dominant and enlarging practice of assertion and performance of lived existence. I align the selfie with the snapshot, making a point about their extraordinary cultural force and productivity determined by their distinctive economies and technical bases as well as cultural statuses. An expression of our desire to be visible in the social world, the selfie, I argue, is a sub-genre of portraiture which exposes and “proliferates” our face as an activity promising interaction. In the “post-face” phase of our culture this performative face is a surface of the visual present, always in the making.

Vitomil Zupan (1914–1987), a former partisan and political prisoner, and Lojze Kovačič (1928–2004) who was exiled as a German speaking child with his family from Switzerland to Yugoslavia, rank among the most outstanding autobiographers in modern Slovene literature. After a brief theoretical discussion on ethics and a dialogue on autobiographical discourse, the paper discusses the intersections and dialogical interplay between the real author, the writer, the narrator, the characters and the reader in their writings since the 1970s, taking into account the background of their personal experiences and the political, ideological and social conditions represented in their texts. As they pursued different concepts of self-representation, special emphasis is placed on ethical issues that derive from the autobiographical genre, respectively, from the specifics of the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling as well as on the significance of ethical questions within the aesthetics of their writing.

We usually perceive archives as the end of the active life of a document, a place where a document is deposited to be protected and preserved for the creation of future memories and histories. And yet archives are beginnings as much as they are ends: they give their documents a new life and particularly with the advent of digitisation, new and diverse forms of life; but they can also deprive their documents of a future life, by hiding them through mysterious cataloguing structures, complex classification practices or merely spatial arrangements. Apart from curators and archivists who create and organise archives, often hiding documents in them, researchers also create archival assemblages when they bring together documents from diverse archives and sources around the world. But researchers, like archivists, often hide the archival strategies or sources of their research, through their immersion in the power relations of knowledge production. In this paper I look at the creation of an archival assemblage from my research with documents of life written by French seamstresses, active in the feminist circles of the romantic socialist movements of the nineteenth century. What I argue is that as researchers we need to become more sensitive to the life of the documents of life we work with; simply put: we cannot engage with documents of life while ignoring the life of documents within the archive and beyond.

This paper intends to contribute to the ongoing debate on identity construction by offering a textual analysis of two memoirs that depict the experience of young widowhood: Unremarried Widow by Artis Henderson (2014) and When it Rains by Maggie MacKellar (2010). I refer to the texts as young widow memoirs and identify them as a sub-genre of the grief memoir. Drawing on Paul Eakin’s concept of narrative identity and Hubert Hermans’ dialogical self theory, the analysis investigates how the memoirists use narrative to negotiate and represent the multiple subject positions and conflicting voices that arise out of the experience of young widowhood, and how they position selves which existed prior to their loss in relation to their post-loss selves. The memoirs under review are shown to rebuild a relatively stable sense of self out of the multiple voices of loss.

In contrast to a long scholarly tradition that “separated subject from object, mind from matter” (Hodder 2012, p. 15), current writers of autobiography do no longer ignore the fact that “the content of our so-called inner lives comes heavily freighted with material from outer sources” (Eakin 2009, p. 102). The focus on things runs counter to internal and essential concepts of selfhood as they are rooted in Western thinking and rather make visible the material world, the body and the environment as formative factors of selfhood. It thereby contrasts the Cartesian concept of self founded on thought and reflection with a concept of self based on materiality. Drawing on Nancy K. Miller’s autobiography What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past (2011) this paper will demonstrate that autobiographical objects foster a relational concept of self that is situated in the in-betweenness of subject and object, ego and autre as well as between the biographical and the autobiographical. Thus, the integration of objects highlights the fact that existence is not an individual affair, but that an autobiographical self emerges through and as part of his/her entangledness. Connected to this is the observation that objects function as a form of resistance against the processes of mind based epistemology and make a plea for “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988).Finally, the essay takes a glimpse at some contemporary autobiographies from Britain, Sweden and Germany to illustrate that object-based life writing and the specific epistemology connected to it are worthy of further investigation.

Strong Room, by the artist and researcher Jane Wildgoose and the artist Roelof Bakker, was published in 2014 by Negative Press London, a small press established by Bakker with the aim of initiatiing collaborations in print between artists and writers. Strong Room mixes photographs showing traces of preserved past human activity with writing, which highlights the loss of tangible experience and lack of physical presence in the digital world. Reflecting on the aesthetics of abandoned workspaces and the historical and academic importance of paper-based archives, Bakker and Wildgoose explore the potential for perceptions of materialiy to prompt the imagination and evoke memories. In this article, the artists reflect on a range of subjective responses to archives and archival materials and discuss the background to their collaborative approach to developing the book: presenting a selection of Bakker's photographs together with extracts from the accompanying essays in Strong Room.

Without seeking to be exhaustive, this paper offers an overview of the different ways in which workers’ autobiographies have been analysed in France in the human sciences. In the first phase, a social and political approach was dominant. Through workers’ autobiographies written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, researchers have attempted to grasp the relationship to politics, and especially in the twentieth century the acceptance or rejection of the communist model in the reconstruction of their political and trade union trajectories. At the same time, in a cultural approach, they have tried to understand the educational and literary influences which marked these self-taught workers who, unusually in the workers’ world, crossed over from practices of reading to practices of writing. Over the last ten years, workers’ autobiographies have become sources particularly used in the framework of labour history and workers’ history. Indeed they make it possible to grasp how men and women articulate their working conditions: the atmosphere in the workshop, gestures in work and relations between the body and the work, perception of noises and smells, relationships with hierarchy and trade-unions. These autobiographies can be considered as constituting real “political acts” which contribute to class struggle. Finally, at the intersection of anthropological researches about “ordinary writings” and literary studies about the writing of work and writing at work, they pose a question about the means and the meaning of writing experiences by paying more attention to the form of the writings and to the workers’ literary ambitions, which are often revealed in interviews.

Diaries present a valuable source for historical research. They provide an insight into the lives of ordinary people, informing us about the everyday as well as the extraordinary in the context of changing times and societies. Diaries give us a personal perspective on public issues, an understanding of how people thought at a certain time and place, information almost unobtainable from other sources. However, diary writing is a genre at risk. Not only do diarists often disregard the value of their writings and make no plans or efforts for their future conservation, but the private nature of diaries often makes people hesitant about saving them for future generations. In addition, the advancement of the digital age is radically changing the genre. Traditionally associated with pen and paper, diaries are increasingly ‘written’ online or otherwise compiled through the use of digital methods. The internet is quite literally changing our lives as well as the practices of life-writing.

The ordering, de-abjectifying function of language is often harnessed by the diary writer: re-living and re-writing a fictive self through diary writing allows the writer control and understanding of the self which has experienced and then changed in the interval of time between the event, the recording, and the rereading. The diaries of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf lend credence to this possibility of recovering abject identity through language. Their diary accounts of mental illness wield mastery over their experiences and emotional responses by choosing to recount them (or not). My paper seeks to reveal how Plath’s and Woolf’s distancing and retelling does not simply divide their selves (the pre- and post- trauma selves, the physical and textual selves), but allows them a greater range of movement, enabling mediation and reconciliation of many self-identities from the past, present, and future, and granting the authority to narrate their own continuums of becoming.

The political diaries of Ulla Lindström caused a great sensation when published in 1969, three years after her resignation as Swedish minister without portfolio. She was the only woman minister in the Swedish government from 1954 to 1966, and her career had, according to the press, been characterized by faux pas or, as one reviewer of her diaries wrote: “(t)he silly Ulla /…/ of the botches, bodges, and gaffes.” He added that he himself had helped to write her down “with both malice and recklessness.” He was, however, not the only journalist putting down Ulla Lindström. A particular discourse or way of describing Ulla Lindström’s political persona was developed in the Swedish press during Lindström’s ministerial career. She started as the good-looking “pin-up girl” of the Parliament and ended up as the “shrew” of the party, the faux pas queen who was too talkative and thus in need of a muzzle. She was constructed as deviant, both as a woman and as a politician. In her political diaries Ulla Lindström herself compared the way she and her male colleagues were portrayed in the press. In my paper I will compare Lindström’s own political persona with the persona created in the press asking what was behind the creation of the “faux pas queen”. Genuskrockar och fadäser. Statsrådet Ulla Lindströms politiska dagböcker. Swedish abstract: Såsom åtskillig forskning visat har det varit svårt för politiskt aktiva kvinnor att förena de motstridiga krav som ställts på dem som handlingskraftiga politiker och ”riktiga” kvinnor. Inom massmedieforskning används ofta ordet persona för att beskriva den personlighet som en politiker iscensätter på den offentliga arenan, en politisk persona. Problemet för politiker är att det i massmedia ofta skapas en annan persona än den som politikern själv iscensätter, så beskriver t ex en forskare hur en ”false persona” av Hillary Rodham Clinton skapades under den så kallade Whitewateraffären (Cit efter van Zoonen 2005:100). Pressens bild av Ulla Lindström som ett pratigt och beskäftigt statsråd, vars karriär präglades av grodor, fadäser och klavertramp, kan ses som ett sätt att ”skapa” en politisk persona och med den en diskurs; ett specifikt sätt att tala och skriva om regeringens enda kvinnliga minister åren 1954-66. När Ulla Lindström efter sin avgång 1966 publicerade de politiska dagböcker hon fört under sin statsrådstid var ett av hennes motiv sannolikt att hon ville ge sin version, dvs skapa sin egen politiska persona som motvikt mot den bild som skapats av henne i pressen. I mitt bidrag skall jag ge exempel på hur Ulla Lindström skapades som politisk persona och hur hon själv såg på eller tolkade den bild som gavs av henne.

Kafka in the Letter to His Father mimics a courtroom trial with pleadings and rejoinders; Sarraute in Childhood tells her story in the form of a dialogue between herself and an initially confrontational, later complicit interlocutor. Curiously, both autobiographical texts have accusatory agendas. Kafka levels an accusation against his father, Sarraute against her mother. Following Rousseau, autobiographies that accuse others and/or vindicate the self are not rare, but the art of accusation is delicate: in order to stick and not boomerang on the writer, the accusation must be persuasively delivered. This paper examines how Kafka and Sarraute, both lawyers by profession, balance the dialogue form and the accusation. It is argued that each writer uses his or her version of the dialogue tactically, to accuse the parent while camouflaging the accusatory agenda, but in the end to win the case.

Richmal Crompton was born in Bury, Lancashire on 15 November 1890 and she wrote and published ‘Just William’ stories from 1919. She was very prolific, and published thirty-eight ‘Just William’ story collections, some forty novels and other short story collections. She is most famous for her stories about an eleven year old boy called William who features in the ‘Just William’ stories. Crompton often wrote ideas on fragments of paper. Her archive at the University of Roehampton also includes letters and other documents from fans, friends, family, local organisations and businesses which have, on the other side, ideas for her stories. The archive houses Crompton’s library taken by her family from her last home. Personal notes and postcards from friends were found inside these books. Moreover, the archive includes other personal items, such as her desk, typewriter and glasses. This essay will consider how we can understand the archive of the author, Richmal Crompton, based on a diatextual analysis that draws connections across the fluid boundaries that all of this material creates within this physical and imaginative space.

This paper outlines a project centered on the teaching of Autobiography and Personal Narrative at the University of Lisbon. The course was an effort to ignite personal/collective empowerment through writing in a country where such writing has long been repressed by a variety of cultural imperatives. Students read autobiographical articles and book excerpts by well-known English language writers, read practically-oriented theoretical pieces, and wrote stories of their own lives prompted by their readings and discussions as they experienced and gained authority through authorship. Their growing self-advocacy registered as the course progressed, evidenced by the detail and reflection, authenticity and complexity of their written work.

We aim to reveal the transformations of the subject, structure, goals, and functions of autobiographical practice from diary to blog in Russia, its traditions and developments as a specific form of political and cultural networking. The proposed paper is based on the comparison of the diaries of Alexander Turgenev (1784-1845), historian and a journalist, and the blog of Boris Akunin (Georgii Chkhartishvili, 1956-), a writer, translator, historian. Turgenev’s diaries were published as “Chronicle of a Russian” in reputable literary magazines and political journals in the 1830-40s; they contributed to the formation of the intelligentsia and furthered cultural links between Russia and Europe. Akunin expresses his political views on his blog “Love of History”, posting autobiographical notes, travelogues, reflections, correspondence, and photographs. Juxtaposing the diary and blog promises to yield rich insights into Russian cultural practices over time.

As a contribution to the verifiable moment that auto/biographical explorations of the father are undergoing in the first two decades of the 21st century, my paper focuses on four authors whose relational memoirs "go beyond the subject." In particular, I focus on a comparative analysis of three hybrid texts -Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude (1982), Philip Roth's Patrimony (1991), and Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation: an Argument with my Mexican Father (1992)-, and I include a parallel reading of Dutch author Henri J. M. Nouwen's spiritual journey The Return of the Prodigal Son (1992). My transnational, transethnic reading of these very disparate versions of what has been called "patremoir" (Andre Gerard, 2012) or "patriography" (Couser, 2011) will explore how these authors mix their own portrait with the extended portrait of their (real or metaphoric) father, applying different myths, borrowing forms and strategies from literary antecedents, transgressing norms of familial secrecy and privacy, but -in the end- paying homage to their paternal legacy.

Following two successful conferences in Amsterdam in 2009 and in Tallinn in 2011, the third IABA Europe biennial conference, held from 31 October to 3 November 2013 in Vienna and hosted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, was entitled “Beyond the Subject. New Developments in Life Writing” and aimed at bridging the gap between historical forms of life writing and the most recent medial transformations in the genre of life writing, like personal websites, blogs and social networks as new spaces in the autobiographical public sphere. At the same time, the conference focused on auto/biographical practices that consciously undermine the traditional Western concept of the subject and develop alternative models of life writing. After the conference, participants were invited to submit articles based on their papers presented at the 2013 IA BA Europe conference, to be published in the European Journal of Life Writing. In this section of the journal you will find samples of the different topics that were addressed during the conference.

Pioneered by the British writer Tony Parker, literary docu-memoir is a rare form that involves the creative nonfiction writer interviewing and audio-taping ordinary people for their unusual life experience as the resource material for a literary production. In everyday conversation, people use a language of their own making to make sense of their experiences for themselves and the person they are talking to. The literary docu-memoir brings out a deeper level of meaning in the speech and the reflections of ordinary people as elicited by the docu-memoirist. In this paper I offer a working definition, and discuss how I evolved the form adapted from that of Parker to fit my own work on care leavers. There are urgent ethical issues in relation to making public distressing episodes from the subjects' lives, and for the writer in relation to readers. In a fictionalised documentary, how does the writer make clear where the boundary lies between fiction and fact, and verbatim and edited testimony? There are also literary questions: How much should the researcher appear in the narrative? How to use the powerful raw material, and recreate the subject’s experience, in a way that readers can access the essence of that experience?